The Glassheart Chronicles Page 4

  "Wait," I said, holding out my hands, my futile attempt to stay her in her place but she sprinted anyway, running as fast as possible to her car. I ran after her, hurdling over the large stone at the end of our drive and slamming her door closed before she could open it all the way, my arms encasing her. She tore at them in desperation.

  "Please, stay away from me!" she begged. "I can't do this. Please!"

  "Madeleine!" I yelled, her beseeching making my heart ache. "Listen to me!" Her eyes met mine for the briefest moment. "Call your brother," was all I could think to say.

  "What?" She asked, wide-eyed.

  "Just, call your brother. Tell him everything. Leave nothing out. Please, just do that for me."

  I released her from my prison arms.

  She hurriedly opened her door but before she sat, she threw over her shoulder, "I'm sorry but this is too frightening. I can't do it...I..I won't do it. Please, just leave me alone." And with that, she slammed her door shut and sped off, leaving in her wake, a devastated, very alone, and utterly gutted, me.

  Two weeks later, the ache had grown debilitating. I was barely sleeping, taking to the couch in a vegetable-like state, keeping the television on to drown out my paralyzing sorrow but it didn't work, nothing did. After noticing the lack of life in me, my dad asked if it was my job I missed so much and I was forced to attempt a smile around both my parents so they didn't pile any more guilt on their heavily-ridden shoulders but they eyed me wearily and I knew I was fooling no one.

  I saw Madeleine about town, stunning as ever, but even as beautiful as she was, I knew she suffered as I did, deep circles kissed the underneaths of her eyes, her cheeks had become sunken, her hair missing the sheen it always owned.

  We were dying, literally dying.

  I called Elliott five times a day and he tolerated me with kindness, having experienced this first hand and he confirmed it. We were dying. A slow death, but death nonetheless. He attempted to get a hold of Madeleine but she evaded his phone calls over and over, ignoring his pleas. I pounded on her door every night, pleading with her to listen to me, promising her we could figure things out but it was all for not. She wanted nothing to do with me.

  It was two am the Monday of that third week, an infomercial resounded in the background but it didn't have my attention. The only attention I could afford to give was for the aching hole inside my chest. I stared blankly at the television, seeing nothing when I heard someone pounding loudly at my front door. I threw my body up, grabbing the old baseball bat that sat in my mother's umbrella stand by the front door.

  "Who is it?" I asked, squinting out the peep hole.

  Madeleine.

  I froze. She stood, tossing her weight back and forth from one leg to another, her arms wrapped tightly around her abdomen, her face buried in her chest. I threw open the door, tossing the bat to the ground. We stared for several moments.

  "So, I talked to Elliott," she spoke in greeting, choking back a sob.

  "Oh, Madeleine," I said, engulfing her in my arms. Our warmth flooded over us, the light swirling in and around our bodies. She sighed as I let out the breath I'd been holding for nearly three weeks. "I missed you."

  She laughed as a sob escaped from in between her lips. "More than you could possibly imagine." But I could, so I hugged her even tighter.

  "He told me," she continued. "Everything."

  "And?" I asked carefully.

  "And he thinks we share a gift of premonition," she admitted.

  "What does that mean to us, sweetheart?"

  "I think it means," she said, her glassy eyes pleading with mine, "that we have until the next full moon to catch a killer."

  The End

  About Fisher Amelie…

  Fisher Amelie resides in the South with her kick ace husband slash soul mate. She earned her first 'mama' patch in 2009. She also lives with her Weim, 'Jonah', and her Beta, 'Whale'. All these living creatures keep the belly of her life full, sometimes to the point of gluttony, but she doesn't mind all that much because life isn't worth living if it isn't entertaining, right?

  Fisher grew up writing. She secretly hid notebooks and notebooks of dribble in a large Tupperware storage container in her closet as a kid. She didn't put two and two together until after college where it suddenly dawned on her, "Hey, I like writing.”

  She's a bit dense. "No, I'm not."

  "Yes, you are. Put down that Oreo, your butt can't take any more."

  "You're rude."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  Anyway, she likes to write and has finally beaten her self-esteem into submission enough to allow herself to be scrutinized under the 'other readers' microscope.

  "No! No! Not a cover slip! Last time it gave me a ra...." (mumbling)

  Rescue Fisher from her metaphorical specimen slide at www.fisheramelie.com

  The Monster in the Garden

  By

  J.L. Bryan

  It was said that Pascal's landlord, the fat knight Renier de Champcevinel, had two daughters. Agnes, the daughter of his second wife, could readily be seen around the manor, at festivals, or being courted by minor gentry from other villages. She was fourteen, wore her golden hair in long braids, and had an easy smile.

  The knight's first daughter, the eldest, was only spoken of in whispers, and had been for so long that many said she did not exist, or had died at birth, or had long since been delivered to a convent. Others whispered a fantastic story—that she was a hideous monster, a thing of the devil, and was kept imprisoned in the high-walled garden behind the manor house. Her name was Isabel, and she was two years older than Agnes, if she was alive at all. Isabel's mother, the knight's first wife, had died in childbirth.

  On his first day carrying water to the manor house, Pascal was determined to have a glimpse of the monster in the garden.

  Pascal's back groaned under the weight of the wooden staff across his shoulders and the heavy, sloshing buckets at either end. The buckets were sealed with wooden lids, but water leaked out around the edges. He had to bring them uphill from the village well to the knight's house. He was now fifteen years old, and this meant he had just inherited the unpleasant morning task from his older brother.

  Pascal's family belonged to the manor, which meant they served whatever minor vassal the distant Count decided to endow with the land. The Count's family had granted and withdrawn this land for generations, as vassals rose and fell in favor, but the arrivals and departures of lords meant little to the families who were bound to the land.

  Pascal had never ventured far from the cottage where he was born. Neither had his parents, nor his grandparents. Serfs were not permitted to travel, and in any case the world outside the lord's protection was much too dangerous without a horse and sword. Pascal's family owned no such wealth.

  He staggered to the kitchen entrance, as his brother had instructed him, and emptied the buckets into a barrel. The three women of the kitchen staff paid him no attention, and he hurried away with his empty buckets.

  He should have hurried downhill, left the buckets at home, and gone to help his father and brothers dig the new irrigation ditch, but Pascal wanted to see the monster. He continued around the back of the house and saw the high, uneven stone wall, shaggy with vines. The garden was enclosed by three stone walls, the fourth wall being the house itself. Pascal approached it slowly, glancing at the rear windows of the main house to check whether anyone was watching.

  He set down the buckets and staff, wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve, and put his ear to the rock wall. The stones felt cool against his cheek.

  Pascal could hear the sounds of quiet rustling behind the wall, but he couldn't be sure whether they were man or beast. He walked the perimeter of the wall, searching for a crack or a hole through which he could peer. On the wall opposite the house, he did find a crack large enough to admit a little light from inside the garden, and a view of blossoming irises, but that was all.

  He tapped on the wall.

  “Is anyone there?” Pascal whispered.

  The handful of flowers in his view shook, and then he heard a deep, angry growl. The monster. Pascal stumbled backward, tripped over a bucket, and landed in the dirt. He looked to the uneven ridge of stones at the top of the wall, expecting to see a horrible beast leaping down on him, but there was only vines and moss and the endless summer sky above.

  The growling and snarling grew louder, and he scrambled to regain his feet. Pascal hurried downhill, not stopping to grab his empty buckets. The rumors must be true, he thought. An unholy monster lived in the garden.

  The next day, Pascal left in the early dark, even before their chickens were awake and ready to be let outside. His parents slept on a heap of straw. Pascal, his four brothers, and his two sisters each had their own spot on the straw-covered floor. In winter, they slept closer together, near the hearth, but since it was summer they kept their distance. His youngest brother slept between the family's two pigs.

  Pascal walked toward the manor house by the light of half a moon, keeping an eye out for wolves and men, both of which were equally dangerous. He had to move early because of his foolish mistake yesterday, leaving the buckets and staff behind. Now he would need to hike up to the manor house, retrieve the buckets—assuming no one had stolen them—and bring them back downhill to the well before he could deliver the knight's water.

  All of this meant he had to approach the stone wall again, by moonlight, and hope not to stir the monster. Fortunately, his buckets and staff were still there, on the ground beneath the crack in the wall. Apparently nobody else wanted to get too close to the beast, either.

  Pascal's curiosity got the better of him, though. He leaned against the crack in the wall and again looked inside. The purple blossoms looked black in the moonlight
. He still could not see the monster, but his hands shook with fear.

  “Who's there?” a voice whispered. He jumped, expecting someone from the knight's household to grab hold of him and whip him for trespassing in the dark, and for trying to get a look at the knight's dark secret.

  No one was around, and he wondered whether he might have heard the voice of a ghost.

  “I can hear you out there,” the voice came again. It was a girl's voice, he realized. From the other side of the wall. “Who is it?”

  “My name is Pascal,” he whispered back.

  “I do not know a Pascal.”

  “I'm only a commoner.”

  “Why have you come here?”

  Pascal hesitated, but could think of nothing but the truth. “I have heard that a dangerous monster lives within these walls.”

  “Oh? What have you heard of this monster?”

  “They say she has the horns of a goat, the teeth of a wolf, the tongue of a serpent. They say she will devour any man who sees her.”

  “So you thought it would be wise to see her? Do you wish to die?”

  “No...but I wanted to see if it was true.”

  On the far side of the wall, a shape moved to block his view of the flowers. He could make out a single blue eye in the moonlight, but the face in which it was set was shrouded in darkness. Pascal gasped and backed away, then stopped forward and looked in at her eye again.

  “There,” the voice said. “You have seen the monster now. You may go.”

  “You don't sound like a monster.” Pascal remembered the throaty growls from yesterday. Perhaps she was a shape-shifter, like the garoul, men who were said to change into wolves.

  “I am Isabel,” the girl said. “I am the one you came to see. And if you do not wish to die, I do not know what you could want from me.”

  “Are you truly what they say you are?”

  “Perhaps I am worse. You have described me, Pascal. Tell me how you appear. Are you also a monster with goat horns?”

  “Are you making a joke?”

  “Of course not.”

  Pascal hesitated. Maybe she wanted to see if he was the sort of man she liked to eat. “I am just a normal person. Nothing special.”

  “What is your age?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Tell me of your eyes, and hair, and hands.”

  Pascal did the best he could to describe his brown eyes and black hair. He didn't know what to say about his hands, which were callused from years of plowing, digging, weeding and picking. “My hands have five fingers each,” he told her. “They would be tough and chewy to eat.”

  She laughed, and the sound was so lovely that he could not believe she was any kind of monster.

  “Have you ever touched a woman with those hands?” she asked.

  “Once, at the Feast of Fools,” Pascal said. “Marie let me touch her beneath her dress.”

  “And who is Marie?”

  “She is the daughter of Gerard, the candle-maker.”

  “Is she very pretty?”

  “I think she is.”

  “And you? Are you very pretty?”

  Pascal did not know how to answer. His hesitation brought another laugh from her. As if to join in, roosters crowed across the manor, announcing the immanence of dawn.

  “You should leave now,” she said. “My father might have you killed for speaking to me. There is more than one monster in this household.”

  “Can we speak again?”

  “We should not. If you come again, it should be long after sunset, so that no one will see you. But you should not come again. Promise me you won't, Pascal.”

  “I won't,” he said.

  He carried the buckets down into the village, filled them at the well, and then trudged uphill again with them. The sun was high and hot above him.

  Pascal emptied the buckets into the barrel in the kitchen, as usual, but he noticed the three kitchen servants scowling at him this time. A fourth person was there, a very large and hairy man wearing only trousers. He grabbed Pascal by the shirt collar.

  “They tell me you are the reason my breakfast is delayed,” he snarled. “There was no water to boil my eggs.”

  Pascal opened his mouth to apologize, but the man punched him in his teeth. Pascal reeled back out the kitchen door, and the man hurled one of the empty wooden buckets at him. It bashed Pascal in the forehead as he tried to duck. The other bucket followed, cracking into his knee, and Pascal cried out and fell into the dirt.

  The big man stood over Pascal, blocking the sun. He had a layer of fat, a sign of his wealth, but clearly there were still great muscles underneath. Pascal felt blood trickle from his temple and down his cheek. He managed to push himself to his knees, but his left leg felt too wobbly to let him stand yet. Pain throbbed from where the bucket had hit his knee.

  “What happened to the other boy? He was never late,” the man said, and Pascal realized he was the Chevalier Renier de Champcevinel, his landlord. Pascal was accustomed to seeing him in public, dressed in a little finery, with an entourage. Now, wearing only his trousers, the knight looked just like any peasant man scratching himself in the morning.

  “Sire, that was my brother, Robert,” Pascal said. “I apologize. I will never--”

  “His name, and your name, are of no importance.” The knight kicked one of the buckets. “Water. At sunrise. Every day.”